Adventures and observations of an everyday goddess in La La Land.

December 14, 2010

Someday, the library will refuse to take your paper books.

You'll just have to take them to the recycling facility. Because paper is going bye bye in our lifetimes, make no mistake and the library isn't going to have much use for your paper any more than you do.

I believe this, and yet, my process of freeing myself from the paper in my life is happening in baby stages. Bouts of clinging and purging. I pulled my young adult fiction in September, but only got it to the thrift store right before Thanksgiving. Somebody scored a whole set of Harry Potter books for the holidays.

I thought that it would be awhile before the paper purge bug bit again, but this weekend while I was doing chores I glanced at my shelves and spied a collection of screenplays - in book form. I bought them pre-film school, before I developed the thing where you read screenplays in script format and can feel the timing and pacing. Now when I read screenplays I want to see a full script page at a time, and I want to know I'm really on page 30 when I'm on page 30. Screenplays in book form sometimes maintain this, but often don't. And my collection of screenplays in book form is a testiment to who I was pre-film school. Not to mention I now have a pretty solid collection of screenplays printed out on paper and held together by brads.

I dream of the day that collection is electronic, too, but for now, screenplays in books: out.

Also out: Any book that I have on my 100 Classic Books cartridge for my Nintendo DS. That cleared out quite a few paperbacks, but I discovered that my giant copy of Huckleberry Finn is signed to me by my late great aunt, and a couple of the books in question are in books that include another book, so I hung onto those for now. (Full disclosure: Nintendo gave me 100 Classic Books. And the DS.)

This bout of what-can-I-pull-from-the-bookshelf-to-get-rid-of also pulled a few random books here or there, but unlike when I pulled the young adult fiction, I don't feel like I made much of a dent, even though I pulled 25 books that I'm going to drop off at the library.

Worse is that I thought for sure I'd dump some books from my giant "haven't read" pile, but when I went to pull them, I changed my mind. Oy vey.

Also...

Dear universe, I am ready for an electronic pad product that can read Flash, has a USB drive, and is slightly bigger than an iPad. Amen.

But paper books have a benefit that digitized files do not. I don't need an intermediary to read a paper book. I can walk into any library, pick up a book, and as long as I have vision and learned to read, I can access the text of that book myself. Additionally, the process of doing that has not changed in hundreds of years.

Digitized files, on the other hand, require an intermediary in the form of software and hardware. And the process of digitizing changes a text. The brain accesses the content in a different way in digital format.

As long as there is a digital divide, the library will provide books in paper format.

I don't even have a pad yet, but the mere existence of the tech is making paper annoying to me. It takes up space, it takes up resources. And libraries will give people access to digital books. You'll either have your own tech, or you will go use theirs. I'm not talking next year; I'm saying before our time on this planet is through - And I know I've got at least another 50 years, so we'll see how long the transition takes... :D